Title Ovid and the liberty of speech in Shakespeare's England / Heather James, University of Southern California

Published Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021 ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (x, 287 pages) : illustrations Contents Cover -- Half-title page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Taking Liberties Poetry and the Liberty of Speech -- Chapter 1 Flower Power: Political Discontents in Spenser's Flowerbeds -- Chapter 2 Loving Ovid: Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy -- Chapter 3 Shakespeare's Juliet: The Ovidian Girlhood of the Boy Actor -- Chapter 4 In Pursuit of Change: The Metamorphoses in A Midsummer Night's Dream -- Chapter 5 The Trial of Ovid: Jonson's Defense of Poetic Liberty -- Epilogue Ovid in the Hands of Women: Milton's Eve and Wharton's Love's Martyr, Or Witt Above Crowns -- Bibliography -- Index Summary "The poetry of Edmund Spenser is coming to be seen as feisty and, for many critics, increasingly distant from the sycophantic affair described by political philosophers such as Karl Marx, who did not like Spenser, and cultural critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, who both did and did not. Marx saw nothing in Spenser but an 'arse-kissing poet,' while Greenblatt famously argued that the poetry's lush beauty is directly linked to its most violent engagements with colonialism. Spenser has long been seen as an appreciative consumer and purveyor of pat moral precepts and, what is more, a near prisoner of a belief in encomia and flattery as the means to elevate his poems' and his own prospects in the colonial and imperial milieu of Elizabethan England. He has been known to offer bouquets of rhetorical flowers to people in high places and, as the notoriously high number of dedicatory sonnets appended to the 'back matter' of the 1590 Faerie Queene suggests, even he could be embarrassed by the bounty of prospective dedicatees. But this is only part of the story of Spenser in his fierce negotiations with political authorities over the ownership of the poetic word. Literary critics do not go to political philosophers to understand the radical potential of poetic flowers or to reflect on the lives of flowers and floral emblems in ancient myth and verse. They do not do so because, as Elizabeth Fowler has pointed out, the boundaries among the disciplines of knowledge are harder to cross today than in Renaissance England"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on July 07, 2021) Subject Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. or 18 A.D. -- Influence SUBJECT Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. or 18 A.D. fast Subject Freedom of speech in literature. English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism Poetic license. LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. English poetry -- Early modern Freedom of speech in literature Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) Poetic license Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2021012283 ISBN 9781108767484 1108767486 1108807216 9781108807210

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